Dr. Son Nguyen is the cofounder & CEO of Neurond AI, a company providing world-class artificial intelligence and data science services.
What if accessing knowledge, which used to require hours of analyzing handwritten scrolls or books, could be done in mere moments?
Throughout history, the way humans acquire knowledge has experienced great revolutions. The birth of writing and books altered learning, allowing ideas to be preserved and shared across generations. Then came the Internet, connecting billions of people to vast information at their fingertips.
Today, we stand at another shift: the age of AI tools, where AI doesn’t just give us answers—it provides reliable, tailored responses in seconds. We no longer need to gather and evaluate the correct information for our problems. If knowledge is now a tool everyone can hold, the real revolution starts when we use this superpower to solve problems and improve the world.
From The Invention Of Writing To The Age Of AI
Imagine a world where every thought, story and hard-earned lesson disappeared the moment it was spoken. That was humanity’s reality until writing came along. Through writing, we have been able to pin down our ideas, document history, share wisdom and inspire future generations. The written word has been a cornerstone of human development, connecting minds across continents and enabling societies to grow.
Fast-forward a few millennia, and humanity has taken another big step: the Internet. By 1993, Tim Berners-Lee had flipped the switch on the World Wide Web, and suddenly, the world had become smaller. For the first time, anyone with a modem could dive into a vast ocean of information. From cooking recipes to quantum physics, it was all there, a few clicks away.
But here’s the catch: That knowledge ocean was huge, and there was no guide to help you navigate it. We became digital explorers, sifting through mountains of data. There was gold but also plenty of garbage, with little time to separate the two. It was exciting, sure, but exhausting. We had access to everything, yet still had to fight the question: How do we find what matters?
Enter artificial intelligence (AI)—the next chapter in the story of human creativity. While AI has been around for a few decades, it exploded into the spotlight with the arrival of ChatGPT. Starting with GPT-1 in 2018, it grew into GPT-3 by 2020, a tool capable of answering questions, writing and coding. Today, newer versions handle complex tasks such as processing images, maintaining context in long conversations, and integrating with tools such as Microsoft Office. Apart from ChatGPT, generative AI tools—including DALL·E, Gemini and Claude—have seemingly transformed industries overnight. Now we’re not just searching for answers ourselves; the answers are coming to us.
Ask any question, and AI doesn’t just point you to a webpage; rather, it understands, processes, and responds to you like a friend. Need to write an article on beauty tips? Done. Create a breakdown of customer retention techniques? Here you go.
But will this eruption of GenAI and instant access to answers reduce our curiosity and sense of exploration? Critics worry it might, but history suggests otherwise. Here’s why: Every answer AI gives us doesn’t close a door; rather, it opens a window to a new set of questions. Ask it about the business operation, and it’ll tell you about human connection; then you’ll wonder what’s inside it, and off we go again.
If AI Is The Answer, What Will Be The Question?
We keep hearing AI gives the answer, but to what? The question at the heart of AI’s existence is the challenges humans face: Businesses struggling with productivity or individuals looking to simplify their work.
At its core, AI promises to lift the burdens of inefficiency, confusion and repetition, freeing us to work smarter, live better and dream bigger.
Businesses exist for one reason: to create value for customers and clients. Whether delivering a product, scaling up an idea or inventing something entirely new, the mission is clear: to make things better. This means improving the client’s current situation by solving their pain points and creating new opportunities by offering solutions they didn’t know they needed.
You can harness AI’s power to address challenges and questions specific to their operations. Rather than relying on AI for generic tasks, you must step into the client’s shoes and see the world through their eyes. What are their struggles? What do they dream of achieving? By leveraging AI to explore these questions, you can generate insightful answers and transform those ideas into practical, valuable solutions—driving growth and customer satisfaction in a competitive market.
For individuals, from software developers to sales assistants or even students, AI can be a powerful tool to enhance one’s current performance and take it to the next level. Instead of spending hours writing repetitive code, software engineers have AI tools that can handle it in seconds.
Once AI lets us do our jobs better, we’ll have time to set new personalized goals and development plans. An architect might use AI to model buildings faster, maybe having time to explore his interest in finance. AI doesn’t lessen your scope—it expands it, letting you re-explore who you are and what you can do. It also opens doors to try new things and rediscover our capabilities. Rather than worrying about it taking our jobs, we should see it as a partner that boosts our potential to achieve more.
Conclusion
If AI provides you with all the answers, the power to change the world won’t lie in the answers themselves but in what you choose to do with them. From writing to the Internet to the AI age, each knowledge leap has expanded our potential. The real question isn’t what AI can answer but what problems we’ll dare to solve and the value we create with it.
AI offers businesses a lens through which they can see their clients’ needs more clearly and a lever to create value like never before. For individuals, it’s a chance to sharpen our skills and chase bigger dreams. Let’s use AI power to build a world that’s not just smarter but better for everyone.
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